Today our guest is Ilsa J. Bick! She is the author of critically acclaimed and award-winning fiction, including The Ashes Trilogy.Welcome to the blog, Ilsa. Thanks for joining us! Thanks for having me! What can you tell us about your newest novel, White Space? Well, here’s the blurb-y part (which I helped to write, so it counts): Seventeen-year-old Emma Lindsay has problems: a head full of metal, no parents, a crazy artist for a guardian whom a stroke has turned into a vegetable, and all those times when she blinks away, dropping into other lives so ghostly and surreal it’s as if the story of her life bleeds into theirs. But one thing Emma has never doubted is that she’s real. Then she writes “White Space,” a story about these kids stranded in a spooky house during a blizzard. Only her story turns out to be a dead ringer for part of an unfinished novel by a long-dead writer. The manuscript, which she’s never seen, is a loopy Matrix meets Inkheart story in which characters fall out of different books and jump off the page. Thing is, when Emma blinks? She might be doing the same thing and, before long, she’s dropped into the very story she’s written. Trapped in a weird, snow-choked valley, Emma meets other kids with dark secrets and strange abilities: Eric, Casey, Bode, Rima, and a very special little girl, Lizzie. What they discover is that they—and Emma—may be nothing more than characters written into being from an alternative universe for a very specific purpose.

Now what they must uncover is why they’ve been brought to this place—a world between the lines where parallel realities are created and destroyed and nightmares are written—before someone pens their end. White Space has been described as psychological horror. How would you define psychological horror vs. horror in general? Oh, that’s a very good question, and actually, WHITE SPACE has elements of both. I think that horror, in general, promotes feelings of fear and awe. Think about it for a second. Take those old Bible stories—no, no, relax; I’m not trying to be a religious case here—but every time the Divine shows its face, it’s both a horrific event that inspires fear while also provoking awe. Moses can’t look at the burning bush; Paul is blinded. Stuff like that. Basically, every time that the Divine and a mortal come face to face, one look at the Divine might just drive you crazy, or kill you, or both. (It’s one of the reasons why, in some cultures, you never look a monarch or emperor in the eye, or you only speak of a king or queen in the third person.) That horrific visage is something you have to look away from at the same time that you also feel you must look. In fact, it’s a lot like going to a horror movie, if you think about it. The worst things always happen off-screen or out of the corner of your eye; I’m thinking of The Blair Witch Project here as a great example of exploiting the desire to see the horrific (especially when you can’t quite catch a glimpse and then are always straining to see or hear what you missed). And how many times have you sat through some really terrible scenes that you just can’t stand to watch . . . except you do by peeking through your fingers or squinting? You’re being a bit like Moses that way, aren’t you? Hiding your face and afraid to look, and yet desperately wanting to see, and so your fingers provide you a little distance, some mental breathing room so you don’t really feel the full impact of whatever’s on screen? You can be scared and what you’re watching can be deliciously terrifying, but you feel like you’re going to live through it, and it’s not so bad. But, essentially, horror like that lasts for as long as your fear level’s kicked up a notch to that sense of not being able to look away. Anything less, and now you’re talking garden-variety fear. (Not that fear isn’t horrible, but I don’t think that fear is quite the same.) To my way of thinking, psychological horror is a little bit different because we’re talking about the mind now, and we all know how revved we can make ourselves, how much dread we can manufacture. Psychological horror owes its power to our imaginations and not necessarily what’s real. In fact, if you think of all those situations where you’ve been just dreading something . . . once you face it and it becomes real, it’s not necessarily as horrible as you thought it might be. Think about movies where characters creep around corners and everyone jumps when the cat pops out. You’re all imagining something much worse, right? You’re filled with dread, and that’s all manufactured by what you’re afraid might happen. There are lots of people, paralyzed by dread and their own imaginings, and so unable to navigate the world because they’re so terrified of what might be lurking, unseen, around the corner. Your books often feature mature themes. How do you address these realistic situations while keeping it YA-appropriate? Is there a YA line in the sand, or is it more nuanced? To be really honest, I never think about this; I just do it. I tell the stories that I want to tell, and I don’t worry about the rest. I guess you could say that, basically, I’m all about taking risks and pushing the envelope. (And, honestly, if a kid isn’t interested in what you’ve written, he’ll put the book down and go to something else.) I sometimes think that adults don’t give kids any credit for being able to handle risky “mature” themes. Heck, if you think about it, in times past kids as young as twelve, thirteen, fourteen were getting married, going to war, having babies . . . our definition of maturity changes with the prevailing culture. Turn on the TV news, and there are plenty of mature themes kids are exposed to every day. They’re either interested, or they turn off the TV and go blow up aliens on their computer games. Adults worry too much, you ask me. There was a great article in The Atlantic about this just the other week, about how over-protected kids are these days—how risk-aversive and increasingly dependent they are—primarily because their parents are so bloody anxious and want to shelter them from every single little bruise and bump. You should check it out: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/03/hey-parents-leave-those-kids-alone/358631/How does your work as a child psychiatrist impact your YA fiction? I’m not trying to dodge this question, but I also don’t know how to answer it. It’s kind of like asking me how being me impacts my writing, you know? I’m a child shrink, and I’ve been one for so long that I can’t imagine not being one. I guess you could say that I think I have a better understanding of and respect for how nuanced things can be for kids, and that they think way more deeply than a lot of adults—and writers—give them credit for. Really, not everything is about how to get a boyfriend, or whether you should put out for the guy, or if tangerine nail polish goes with pink lipstick. (I remember reading a book a ton of people were just wild about, and all those girls nattered on about for pages was nail polish. Like . . . wuh? I finally couldn’t stand it and chucked the book, which is a shame because I’d had such high hopes. But . . . seriously?) It’s not that the kids in my books are navel-gazers or broody or crap like that, but I do think kids can be pretty deep thinkers. Unfortunately, a ton of that stuff—all that drama under the surface, and there is so much of it; for a teenager, everything feels immediate and earth-shattering and as if things will never get better sometimes—is stuff that a lot of adults just don’t really want to acknowledge or hear about. But me being a child shrink . . . that was my job: to listen to kids and help them find the words to tell their stories. What makes the zombies in Ashes different? What do you find interesting about dystopian/horror fiction? Well, first off, there are no zombies in ASHES. (I just thought I’d get that out of the way.) The Changed don’t die; they’re not shambling creatures who only want to have you for lunch; they don’t have a virus; they don’t bite and then infect you. The Changed are fundamentally altered by something that happens to their brains. Think of it this way: they’ve undergone a major lifestyle change and are now people you really wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. Personally, I don’t think the Changed are the scariest people in my books either—although, yeah, they are pretty frightening because they’re so cunning and single-minded. They scheme; they’re very smart; they can be ruthless, and yet in some ways, they’ve got a certain purity to them, too. As you go on in the trilogy, you find that there are a couple with ulterior motives—known only to them because we’re really not privy to how and what they think—but pretty much, with the Changed, what you see is what you get. You can’t really say that about the adults in these books. In some ways, the adults are way more frightening, especially the lengths to which they’re willing to go in order to survive. Gosh, in terms of what I find interesting about dystopian fiction . . . that’s pages and pages, seriously; I give whole presentations on this. One thing, though: dystopic fiction and horror fiction are two different animals. ASHES is not a dystopian; I know people say it is, but it’s not anything like the dystopians out there (although there are some dystopic elements in Rule; I’ll grant you that). But ASHES is an apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novel. It’s about the world falling apart and the choices people make, the rules they’re willing to make, and the compromises they’re prepared to live with in order to stay alive. ASHES is not about people trying to get out from under a brutal regime. (Although I can tell you why I think adolescents like dystopians so much: it’s because they all live in them. They’re called parents and school.) As for my interest in horror fiction . . . I don’t know. I just like it? I tend to see the dark side of things, but that might also be my training as a child shrink talking. Hardly anyone is sweetness and light, and I’ve seen families who say they love each other but who are only bound together by hate. I guess I’m just intrigued by all that ookiness: the things that terrify people; the cruelty that people sometimes wish they had the courage to inflict as well as the petty things they do; the very bad decisions that sometimes very good people make that leads to their lives unraveling before their eyes; and the lies people tell themselves in order to justify greed or avarice or just plain meanness. Life is filled with pleasure, sure, and nice things. But we’re all capable of living down to our worst impulses. YThank you so much for joining us on the Freelance and Fiction blog! You’re welcome. My pleasure.Keep up with Ilsa on her website, Twitter, and Instagram!

Today our guest is Harrison Demchick, author of horror novel The Listeners.Welcome to the blog, Harrison. Thanks for joining us!

Thanks for having me!Tell us about The Listeners!TheListeners is a coming-of-age story in a literary horror context. In a borough quarantined due to an airborne illness that causes deformity, insanity, and death, a fourteen-year-old boy named Daniel, orphaned by the plague, is caught up with a one-eared gang/cult called the Listeners. But all he really wants is to find his best friend Katie, trapped elsewhere in the quarantine. How would you shelve your book? YA, horror? What makes a book fit into those categories for you? This is definitely not a young adult book. Its main character is young, but the audience is very much adult. There have been a few occasions where people have assumed otherwise, but it's not actually the age of the main character that determines a novel's audience as regards adult or young adult, but rather the content and themes. The Listeners doesn't focus on the experience of being a kid or a teen, and it's certainly not a metaphor for such experience, as most speculative young adult is. It's a story of survival, and Daniel's experience is the one that most encapsulates the horror of that. So horror, then, is a better categorization, though honestly, I didn't realize it was horror until I was done writing the original screenplay version. (Actually, it was a collection of short stories, then a screenplay, then a novel.) For me, I was just writing a character story in the context of a plague. Categorization is a funny thing. By day, I'm a developmental editor, and I've been in the publishing industry for going on nine years, but even that doesn't mean you always know how a book is to be categorized. Sometimes there is no set category. Sometimes there are several. Writers create all sorts of things we can't imagine. That's why we read. The plague in The Listeners is similar to a zombie outbreak, but it’s also a bit different. How did you bring something new to a popular genre? Well, I wasn't really thinking about doing that. The zombie connection, more than anything else, is just a useful comparison for helping readers understand the nature of the story. They're zombies, except that they aren't dead, can talk, and don't want to eat people. I think the part that really captured me, or I guess defined the way I was going to present this infection, is the idea of people losing their minds, which is pretty much the most terrifying thing I can imagine. It's not that the sickos, which is what the Listeners call those who are infected, are particularly vicious. They can be, if they see themselves as threatened, or if that's who they were before they were infected, but generally they're just confused and losing their grasp on who they were. And that's the threat anyone stuck within the quarantine faces. The other distinction, I guess, is that the novel isn't really about the sickos so much as the Listeners themselves—the kind of people, and the kind of organization, that thrives when the world goes to hell. That's where Daniel is really trapped. You don't have to be sick to lose hold of who you were. What are the challenges of writing a young character? What are the benefits? The actual challenge I faced early on the process was that I was writing Daniel too young. In the earliest drafts, Daniel is eighteen, but he read younger. So he became seventeen, and I believe he's fifteen in the final screenplay, and in the novel he finally became fourteen. And the reason I kept writing him younger than he was actually intended to be is because he had to be innocent to start with. Daniel is a sheltered kid. He's a young fourteen. He's not someone who understands the world, much less what it's become, which makes him more malleable to a group like the Listeners—which, to them, is part of the appeal. I always had a stronger sense of self than Daniel does, but otherwise he has a good amount in common with me at that age, which I think is why it wasn't too difficult to get into his head. But once I was, he became his own person pretty quickly, and from there it's really a matter of conveying what his experience would honestly be. More than any of the other characters in the original short stories, he had the potential for growth and change I wanted, which is also one of the benefits of a young character. He has a lot of room to grow. You’re also writing a musical and several screenplays, right? What are some ways those types of writing intersect with writing novels? I'm actually a lot more at home writing a screenplay than a novel at this point. It's a far stricter format, but I actually really love structure, and I don't think the story of The Listeners would work as well, or have the depth it has, had I not previously written the story as a screenplay. Given I was starting with a series of short stories, only one of which was about Daniel, the screenplay format gave me the opportunity to plot out a narrative along three acts and generally explore the world of the quarantine from a particular and consistent point of view. That's not to say that a screenplay is an inherent part of the process of writing a novel, or that I won't write another novel at some point. But I absolutely love screenplays. I recently finished a cryptozoological dramedy called Ape Canyon, and I'm starting a new screenplay that I'm not quite ready to reveal. Now as for the musical, that's an entirely different process, or at least it is for me. I collaborated with a friend on the story, and the majority of my work so far has been songwriting, which naturally focuses on music more than plot or character. But at the same time, my co-writer and I need to make sure the fundamental elements of good storytelling are in place. We know where the acts divide. We know who our protagonist is and what drives her. We have a good sense of the developing plot, and the climax is very clear. These are the building blocks for any story, regardless of what form it should take. In this case, the important moments just happen to be revealed through song, which is a lot of fun for me. This is the first time I've ever combined my love of storytelling with my love of songwriting.What is your best advice for writers? As I mentioned before, my day job is developmental editor, at Ambitious Enterprises, and what a developmental editor does is focus on the big-picture issues: characterization and character arc, structure, cause and effect, logic, etcetera. So giving advice to writers is actually my job. In fact, I'm writing a book on writing right now. And there's quite a lot of advice to give, depending very much on who the writer is and what their particular issues happen to be with regard to their own manuscript. But there are definitely some general ideas to keep in mind. One of the most important is really obvious, but also often neglected: A writer needs to write. Back around August or September, I started getting together with a group of friends on Sunday afternoons for the express purpose of working on our own individual writing projects. It's a concept I had been skeptical of before, believing myself to be self-sufficient as a writer. I could write on my own time, and if I was going to spend time with friends, I'd rather spend it doing something else. But I was so very wrong. I've never been more productive in my life than I am right now, because from 3:30 to 7:00 or so every Sunday, I'm writing. It's the reason I finished that screenplay I mentioned, which I'd begun work on in 2011. And it's the reason I made another important discovery: Writing is fun. Generally speaking, we know that—we wouldn't do it if we didn't—but when you're in the middle of a story, and you're not sure what needs to happen next, it can be a grind, especially when you're not putting in the time to do it regularly. But the more often you write, the more often it goes well, and the more often it goes well, the more often you get that amazing writer's high that comes with being successfully productive. So the most important thing a writer can do is write. We all have our own schedules and responsibilities, but if you don't consistently set the time aside, you're never going to achieve what you want to achieve. Thank you so much for joining us on the Freelance and Fiction blog! Of course! Thanks for having me.You can find Harrison Demchick on Facebook and Twitter!If you enjoyed this post, please share it!

Today our guest is Joe Schwartz, author of the novel A Season Without Rain and several short story collections!Hi Joe! Welcome to the blog.Tell us about your book! I wrote it for a very specific reason; dudes don’t talk. We bottle up all these feelings in a vain attempt to stay deaf, dumb, and mute, while pouring bio-chemical crazy glue into our bodies trying to keep it to ourselves. As kids, boys are taught not to cry, and as men we are silently implored to keep our problems to ourselves by other men. My main character Jacob is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, he’s suicidal, and there is absolutely no one he knows who can help him. That is why his job in the parks is so important, this is where he meets men like him, who have failed miserably at life, but somehow have survived. He wants to know their secret, and if possible, become like them.

What do you find special about literary fiction? It is through fiction that we can truly examine our lives. In a story I can tell myself the truth I couldn’t otherwise find. Through it we can examine our health, both mentally and socially. Books like Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, and Johnny Got His Gun changed the way we think. It is proof mere words written on a page and printed for the entire world to see can be more powerful than any drug or weapon formed. I was looking at the Goodreads reviews of your book and it seems like you’ve created a protagonist many can relate to! What’s your advice on writing characters people believe in? Write about people you really have known. Start with yourself and see who else shows up to the party. The best way to perform any role is to be able to empathize with a character, to bring some kind of humanity to what is otherwise just words on a page. Another thing I like to do is carefully select dialogue. Sometimes it isn’t as much as what a character says as what he or she implies, reading between the lines allows the reader to make some inference as to what the writer really means. Last, and I learned this the hard way, is to not use adjectives to describe a character's mood while speaking. If John is sad, show it. For example: “Looks like rain,” John said sadly or “Looks like rain,” John said. He rubbed the back of his neck. His hand trembled, realizing what he had done. This is what those who so blithely advise ‘show, don’t tell’ are talking about. One way is direct and succinct, but there is no air in the balloon. The other is more like an exotic dancer taking one piece off at a time, frustrating you in the best possible ways, making you damn near beg to see more, but oh, what sweet misery it is to have to wait. The cover art is gorgeous! How did you come up with the perfect image for capturing Jacob’s feelings about his life? I wish I did! The cover is the genius of my publisher Kitty Bullard and her graphic artist Amber Rendon at Great Minds Think Aloud. They had foolishly asked me what I thought the cover should look like and I sent them some monstrosity of an idea. Fortunately, they thoroughly rejected it, realizing I had no idea what I was doing when it came to such things. When I first saw it, I realized immediately they had captured in one picture a tone I had tried to create in over three hundred pages. A cover is so very important, as much as the story itself or the editing to perfect it. They say don’t judge a book by its cover because that is exactly what people do! Part of the description hints that Jacob will discover that “there really is a God”. How do you deal with themes of faith and spirituality in A Season Without Rain? Do you often explore the spiritual side of life in your writing? I was recently asked at a book signing, “What if you don’t believe in God?” My response was this: imagine your child was critically ill and the outcome was predictably grim and, given five minutes alone, you desperately reached out in prayer for God to save him or her. Later, unexplainably, a full recovery is made. A person can look at this as a miracle of modern medicine or a supernatural gift of faith. Either way, the outcome has not changed. I believe miracles happen every day, from the simple to the complex. Coincidence, chance, and random events are how we are dismiss these things, calling it ‘lucky’ when we could as easily discern the same situations as divine intervention. I am not trying to convert anyone to any religion, but I really do believe there is a God and I can’t help but write from that point of view. Who are some of the writers you enjoy reading? I first cut my teeth on fiction with John Steinbeck. His work was the first to personally touch me. The Bachman books were also something once read it was impossible to think of life the same way. Charles Bukowski and Donald Goines are a couple awesome writers I’m a bit late coming to appreciate but have found their work inspiring. My favorites lately have been Antonya Nelson, Chad Kultgen, Tony D’Souza, and Greg Baxter.Thank you so much for joining us on the Freelance and Fiction blog!Keep up with Joe Schwartz on his Facebook page, Twitter, or find his work on Amazon.As always, if you enjoyed this interview, please share the love! If you'd like to be featured in an Author POV post, just go here!